Time for a little creative inspiration with me, Elaineabella, for Stamp It Saturday!

Creating Scenes – It Can Be Simple!

One of my favourite things to do when stamping is to create scenes.

If you’re on Instagram you may have seen the sweet Valentine scene I stamped and masked using the Love Backdrop, Smoochie Gnomes and Cupid Chicks stamp sets. If you missed it, here it is!

I love how it turned out. However, it did involve some masking and fiddling to get the placement right. If you are new to stamping and want some tips on masking, you can check out these previous posts here:

• Stamping and Masking
• More Masking Fun
• Die Cut Masking & Distress Inks
• Two Spooktacular ways with Background Stencils
• Stamping & Masking a Winter Scene with Stencils

Today I’m going to show you a simpler option, including a look at how I very quickly and easily coloured the Summer Backdrop stamp to set my scene. Backdrops don’t have to take ages to colour and suck up all your Copic ink (or chew up your pencils and give you hand cramp).

Stamps Used: Summer Backdrop, Tiny Townie Ella Loves Easter, Hoppy Easter & Chocolate Bunnies set.

To create my shadow box card front I used a digital cutting file. I’m not the one for creating tutorials on scoring and folding, but fortunately our lovely Sandiebella already created one for you which you can check out HERE!

A shadow box card, or simply using foam pads to layer parts of the scene is a great way to achieve some depth (see the latter in this post HERE), and really helps if the sizes of your images aren’t well matched for creating a scene. Although, we’re creating cards here, not fine art – a little “whimsy” is definitely allowed! Separating the images a little helps create the general effect, and working with die cut images helps to emphasise the playful, whimsical nature of the scenes.

I used the Summer Backdrop stamp, and rather than colour using Copics I opted for the faster option of Distress Oxide inks. If you don’t have the Distress Oxides, you can absolutely use Distress Inks or any other blendable inks you have on hand. I personally love the Distress Oxides, because I find the combination of pigment and dye inks blends more easily, especially on Bristol Vellum Surface paper.

When colouring a Backdrop stamp in this way, use a few different tones of the same colour to help create depth and interest. In the same way that you might add some shading with markers or pencils, try to get some darker colour to give the impression of shadow and depth. The mini ink blending tools can be really helpful with this, or you can use small foam applicators to apply colour in detail areas.

I used Twisted Citron, Evergreen Bough and Lucky Clover on the grassy slopes, and Cracked Pistachio with Salty Ocean for the sky. I covered the grass area with a piece of paper while spritzing the sky with a little water in a spray bottle to create the pretty oxidised effect. The trees were coloured using Copics – I coloured the trunks directly on the inked background, then stamped and coloured the leafy parts on my favourite Copic friendly paper before cutting them out and layering on the inked backdrop.

I then stamped and coloured my two images – Tiny Townie Ella Loves Easter and Hoppy Easter. These both have coordinating dies, so I was able to die cut them and then pop them on my card with ease. I did do a little additional cutting with a craft knife, to cut out some of the tiny areas where I wanted my backdrop to show through.

Using die cut images to build a scene can save time, and if you’re not too confident with stamping and masking it can really make life easier as you can fiddle around with the die cut images to find the perfect placement before committing!

The sentiment I used comes in the Chocolate Bunnies set.

I did lose quite a lot of the backdrop in my card, so I think I may just have to colour it up again in the same way for a different card design. After all, it wasn’t hard to do, and it took no time at all!

Over To You!

Do you love creating scenes? Show me your scene cards! If you haven’t created any scenes, do you think you might try?

If you are posting your images online, we would love to see them on Instagram and all the platforms mentioned above. To make it easier for us to find you just use #markergeekmonday and/or #stampingbella as a hashtag. Even better tag me @markergeek and @stampingbella . We love it when you connect, so don’t be shy!

If you’re on Facebook join us in our private chat group Stamping Bella Sistahood to share your creations there and chat all things Stamping Bella related!

Until next time, HAPPY STAMPING!

MWAH

Elaineabella